Who would be a writer? Well, no one who wants to earn a living, if the latest numbers published by the UK Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) are to be believed. Median earnings from writing alone are now just £7,000, compared with £10,497 in 2018, with the decline made worse when adjusted for inflation.
The crashing of the pound in recent weeks has hit costs for Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. attendees this week, but publishers and agents insist there is a silver lining for rights and export sales to the US.
In the last month, there have been a few informative articles discussing how much authors earn:
The One Where Writing Books Is Not Really a Good Idea by Elle Griffin (Substack) How Much Do Authors Make Per Book? by Sarah Nicolas (BookRiot) How Much Do Authors Actually Earn? by Lincoln Michel (Substack) Read more
A group of best-selling authors is teaming up with Amazon in a lawsuit that aims to bring down an alleged counterfeit e-book publishing site described as "the biggest pirate book site the world has ever seen." Read more
Four years ago, Kerry Hudson had just won a prestigious French literary prize when one late payment left her unable to make the rent on her sublet flat in Whitechapel. Could she continue as a writer? Or would she have to return to her old job in the charity sector? Read more
A total of 94% of authors in the U.K. are white, with 2% Asian, 2% mixed race, and 1% black. (4% identify as "other.") The most recent census, in 2011, put the white population of the U.K. at 86%. Read more
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."